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This month marks 50 years since the 1967 Abortion Act was passed. Diane Munday was instrumental in ensuring the landmark act was pushed through Parliament. Half a century on, she’s determined to ‘finish the job’ she started

Diane Munday was already a mother to three children under the age of four when she learned she had fallen pregnant for the fourth time in as many years.

She knew she wouldn’t be able to cope with another child and that she must end the pregnancy.

Diane was 30, and it was 1961, six years before the 1967 Abortion Act was passed in England, Scotland and Wales (though not Northern Ireland).

“I bought my abortion because I had a chequebook to wave in Harley Street”

Now aged 86, she is determined to “finish the job” and help liberalise the law further.

This month marks 50 years since that act was passed.

Diane played a pivotal role in helping push the transformative legislation through Parliament, spurred on by her own experience of abortion, and how it compared to those of other, less fortunate, women.

Diane faced an onslaught of aggression and intimidation when she helped lead the campaign for abortion rights in the 1960s, but that did not deter her (Photo: Diane Munday)

Rich vs poor

“I bought my abortion because I had a chequebook to wave in Harley Street,” Diane says.

She and her husband scraped together the money needed to exploit a loophole in the law, paying a psychiatrist to state that Diane’s mental health depended on her having an abortion.

“I handed over the money and I got the bit of paper which said I was suicidal”

It was not a psychiatric assessment but a financial arrangement, she stresses: “I handed over the money and I got the bit of paper which said I was suicidal and if I didn’t get the pregnancy ended I would kill myself.”

Diane and her husband paid 10 guineas for that slip of paper – the equivalent of over £200 today – a price that few could afford.

Several years earlier, an acquaintance of Diane’s faced a similar predicament: married, with three young children she felt unable to cope with another one.

The young woman was “determined not to continue with the pregnancy” but did not have the means to procure the psychiatric opinion recommending a termination. She died as a result of a back street abortion which went wrong. This was not uncommon.

Protesters at the London March for Choice, which took place on Saturday, call for abortion to be legalised in Ireland (Photo: Chris J Ratcliffe/AFP/Getty Images)

Rectifying injustice

Coming around from the anaesthetic after her own abortion, Diane remembered the young woman and reflected on how similar their situations had been.

“I decided then and there I would spend my life campaigning for women who didn’t have the money to get a legal, safe abortion”

“I decided then and there…if needs be I would spend my life campaigning for women who didn’t have [the money] to get a legal, safe abortion when it wasn’t the right time for them to be pregnant.”

Diane attended the first annual general meeting of the Abortion Reforms Law Association (ARLA) and within months found herself on its committee.

In the years that followed, she spoke publicly in favour of legislative reform hundreds of times. She discussed her own abortion openly from the outset.

Secrecy and shame

“I decided it had to come out in the open because…I was beginning to learn that women had abortions but they never talked about them.

“This is the blood of the baby you murdered”

“This was a secret that women kept to themselves.”

After her first public talk, to a local women’s organisation full of “respectable ladies in hats and gloves”, an attendee confided in Diane that she too had had an abortion, but only her husband knew.

“That became a common experience wherever I went.”

A group of nurses deliver an anti-abortion petition to 10 Downing Street on 31 May 1967 (Photo: Wesley/Keystone/Getty Images)

‘Murderer’

Diane’s campaigning prompted an onslaught of abuse.

“Mama? You murdered me”

Standout episodes include finding her car covered in red paint along with a note stating, “This is the blood of the baby you murdered”, and a series of late-night phone calls, during which Diane was greeted by the sound of a crying child, and a voice saying, “Mama? You murdered me.”

Diane was not deterred.

Thanks, in no small part to her tireless activism, the landmark Abortion Act, which came into effect in 1968, made abortion permissible, under certain conditions.

Abortion still not legal

Contrary to popular belief, technically, the law did not legalise abortions: it simply provided a legal defence for those who perform them.

The Abortion Act did not legalise abortions: it simply provided a legal defence for those who perform them

The law has never applied in Northern Ireland, where the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act – passed before women could vote – serves as the foundation of abortion legislation.

It is a source of great frustration for Diane that in the 50 years that have elapsed since the Abortion Act was passed, the UK has gone from being at the forefront of liberalisation to languishing behind the rest of Europe.

Life imprisonment

The UK has the harshest punishment for self-induced abortion of any country in Europe, bar Ireland; women who self-induce an abortion here at any point during their pregnancy are committing an offence punishable by up to life imprisonment.

“Abortion should be treated like any other medical procedure”

Diane is determined to see abortion removed from criminal law and be treated as “no different from any other medical procedure” in her lifetime.

Northern Ireland left behind

Her stance was echoed last month – “finally,” she says – by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG), which voted in favour of supporting the removal of criminal sanctions associated with abortion in the UK.

The Church in Northern Ireland was “implacably opposed” to the Abortion Act

The Church was “implacably opposed” to a relaxing of the laws when it was debated in Parliament in the Sixties. Perhaps more surprisingly, so was the RCOG. Among the medical colleges, “only the Royal College of Psychiatrists” supported the act.

Pro-choice activists demonstrate in Belfast in January 2016 in support of a 21-year-old woman charged with intent to procure a miscarriage for herself (Photo: Charles McQuillan/Getty Images)

‘The job is only half done’

“We had to concede,” Diane sighs. “We got the best deal we could.”

“We got the best deal we could”

Now a grandmother to four adult men, Diane still remembers sitting on the terrace of the House of Commons celebrating with strawberries and Champagne on 27 October 1967 after the act was passed.

“I said: ‘Don’t let us forget the job is only half done.’

“I never would have believed then it would take more than half a century [to progress further].”

Changing times

She adds: “It’s incredible if you think about it.

“The world has changed, the place of women has changed, medical techniques have changed”

“The world has changed, the place of women has changed, medical techniques have changed.

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